Tag Archive for SanDisk

June 16, 2014 – Today, SanDisk agreed to acquire Fusion-io in an all-cash deal that values the data storage company at about $1.1 billion. SanDisk will fund the acquisition with cash held on its balance sheet, and it is expected that the deal will finalize in the company’s fiscal third quarter. Salt Lake City–based Fusion-io…

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In early 2012 SanDisk, well-known manufacturer of flash memory products, acquired FlashSoft. Like a number of other companies in the virtualization storage space, FlashSoft has several different products designed to use SSD and flash memory to cache storage I/O. They have specific products for Microsoft Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and clones). They also have a product for VMware environments, SanDisk FlashSoft 3.1 for VMware vSphere.

There is a new set of tools available for Caching up and down the stack which we covered within Caching through out the Stack, however in reality where is the best place to cache data for your application and what are the ramifications of using such a cache. Recently, we had a caching problem, actually two of them. Both caused by the same thing, a lack of full understanding about what was being cached. For any application, the best way to cache is to cache in memory as close to the application stack as possible, which in our stack could be within the application, the OS, or even a hypervisor based disk cache. However, which does your application actually use?

One sure way to improve performance is to cache the non-dynamic data of any application. We did this to improve the overall performance of The Virtualization Practice website. However, there are many places within the stack to improve overall performance by caching, and this got me to thinking of all the different types. At the last Austin VMUG, there were at least three vendors selling caching solutions that were designed to improve overall performance by as little as 2x to upwards of 50x improvements. That is quite a lot of improvement in application performance. Where do all these caching products fit into the stack?